in the social sciences, the study of current trends in order to forecast future developments. While the speculative and descriptive aspects of futurology are traceable to the traditions of utopian literature and science fiction, the methodology of the field originated in the “technological forecasting” developed near the end of World War II, of which Toward New Horizons (1947) by Theodore von Kármán is an important example. At the RAND Corporation in California during the 1950s, Herman Kahn and others pioneered the so-called scenario technique for analyzing the relationship between weapons development and military strategy. Later Kahn applied this technique in On Thermonuclear War (1960), a book that examines the potential consequences of a nuclear conflict. During the time of Kahn’s first studies, the mathematician Olaf Helmer, also at RAND, proposed a theoretical basis for the use of expert opinion in forecasting. In 1964 the French social scientist Bertrand de Jouvenel published...